One of Two Outcomes occur when there is Diversity of Opinions.

I've witnessed some extraordinary scenes on different level while working in a team. We've had the good experience, the weird experience, the bad experience and whatnot. I guess it's really not a surprise that experiences can be like that especially when you are working in a team. Each person has their dynamics and that dynamics can be explored as a tool to make the team set and hit goals efficiently.

That's the bright side of things. How about moments when the dynamics that exists in the team brings diversity of opinion which can subsequently mess up the performance of a team? You know that's also possible, right?

Let's talk about both scenarios;

A Time when Diversity of Opinion worked out well for my team.

Back in 2020 during my National Youth Service, I was selected by an official from Nigeria's Central Bank as one of the Corp Members that will be in a Community Development Service team called Financial Inclusion. The work of the team which we ended up doing for about 10 months was to engage in an enlightenment campaign with the target of getting a lot of Nigerians informed about the basics of Finance.

Financial Education is a very important topic and everyone deserves to be well informed about it. Since that's the case, those of us in the team thought of the best way you go about this. It would be nice to go all-in and teach everyone about Finance, but we had between 50-70 people in the team. The manpower was obviously lacking. We decided to narrow down our target audience and that's where the diversity of opinion came in.

Some people said the target audience should be young teenagers who are in High School while others were of the opinion that it's best we focus on enlightening people in street who mostly didn't get a chance to gain formal education, especially in the area of Finance. We tried to narrow it down to just one of the two, but it was hard to pick one instead of the other.

We decided to divide our team into sub teams; One team was to focus on enlightening High School students about Finances while the other was in charge of giving financial education to folks in street. We all reunited each month to review our performance and the result was mind-blowing. We got to reach out to more people within the space of 10 months, thanks to the diversity of opinion which we entertained in the team.

A Time when Diversity of Opinion turned out to be a hinderance for my team.

Teamwork only works when the team are ready to put in the work. That's just how it is and there is no two ways about it.

During the extra year I had in University, I had a lot of free time to burn so I partened with someone else to establish a lesson center where we coached students who were aspiring to get into University. We started with just two of us and within a few weeks, the lesson center started getting a lot of students. At that point, it became necessary for us to employ more 'capable hands' so we can have more teachers on ground to handle specific subjects.

The idea with lesson centers and reasons why people prefer it to conventional schools when preparing for a Nationwide exam is that we don't beat around the bush in lesson centers. We are all about business and we give students the best intensive teaching about subjects and topics that are relevant to the Exam they are preparing for.

Imagine what would be the case when a teacher in a lesson center is lazy, unqualified and only interested in giving students note to copy.

I had a lot of teachers like that during my school days and I didn't enjoy any of that. When I started teaching and even when I ran my lesson center with a colleague, I made sure I did beyond the basics. However, some of the teachers we hired to teach some subjects turned out to be lazy, unqualified and incompetent.

I fished out two teachers that were like that and talked with the person I co-own the lesson center with. My suggestion was for us to replace the teachers with more competent hands, for the sake of the students and also for the growth of the lesson center. My colleague saw the problem, but didn't think we have to get the teachers replaced. He thought doing that would be harsh.

Long story short, we ended up replacing them when it was already too late. That moment of delay due to diversity of opinion cost our students massively, ruined the reputation of the lesson center and subsequently affected the financial side of the lesson center which we ran as a Business.

Diversity of opinion will always be a thing whenever two or more people are working on a particular project. We just need to know when it's right to accommodate that diverse opinion and when it's best to overlook some.

Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop Or Comma.
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